


Broken Plates

by thegirlnamedcove



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Beach House, Dysfunctional Family, F/F, Family Feels, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Suicide, Thor is out of character in this, and am not patient enough to do so, based heavily on the beginning of David Sedaris's Calypso, because I have not finished it, bitches, but he kind of has to be, but not the end, in order for him to be the narrator, we're writing our own ending
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-27
Packaged: 2019-06-15 14:30:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15415044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegirlnamedcove/pseuds/thegirlnamedcove
Summary: That was Hela, I suppose. What she was to us and what she was to herself. She had always been changing and unstable. She could be productive and cooperative, eager to please and show affection one day, and then angry and sharp, bitter and poisonous the next. She would break plates during arguments, revelling in the noise they made against the floor and the wide eyed surprise it always elicited in us, and then collect the pieces for a mural the next day and present it as a gift.Of course that was just a fancy way of saying she had always had a mood disorder.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Occasionally stories will just randomly pour out of me in big six or seven hour bursts. No planning, no outline, no careful research, I just kind of vomit a story. This is that. I am supposed to be working on my book, but instead I have done this.
> 
> If you've read the first five chapters of Calypso you'll recognize this, but I haven't finished that book so the plot won't go the same way. Thor's narration mirrors David Sedaris's writing style as well as I could manage, which puts him pretty out of character, but I tried to make his dialogue accurate enough. Idk.
> 
> I'm almost done with the last two chapters so I plan to post one chapter per day until it is finished.

In a windy, ugly April, my siblings and I rented a beach house. It had been a tradition from when we were children, lost over the years in a mess of scheduling and schooling and family tantrums. Most of all it was lost to money, what with Hela’s perrenial unemployment and Loki’s career in academia.

But that year we had buried our father, right in the middle of the frozen valley of winter, and I had married Tony just the year before and with him gotten access to the full obscenity of his money, and so I rented a beach house similar to one we’d stayed in before, with impractical bay windows and attic bedrooms, and I pushed and pushed until they both agreed to take the time off and come out to the beach.

If we had had assigned roles in the family, that would be mine. Pushing everyone else into the shape of a family, even as they all individually tried to wander away like a bunch of stray cats. Even my father and mother were prone to wandering, each in different directions, and would sometimes need their middle child to remind them of the responsibilities of having children. It’s a role for which no one, in any family, even receives any praise.

Loki’s role was to elevate us in society.  While the rest of us hung on to our midwestern accents, he adopted a lilting British tone during two semesters abroad in sophomore year and never let it go. While the rest of us worked--dad in the armed forces and later as a mason specializing in tile, mom losing money each year to dual careers in avon and her beloved community theater, me in the tedium of landscaping, Hela in whatever new passion she’d discovered most recently--he seemed determined to remain forever in school, and forever brimming with potential. Where most of us had settled into either long term relationships or single life, he had glamorous affairs in libraries built in the middle ages. Mostly with old wrinkled men, although that year we rented the beach house he was screwing his dissertation chair. A handsome man with strange and alien affectations and a pretentious name that I was always fairly sure he’d made up. En Dwi Gast.

Hela’s role seemed mainly to kick over sandcastles. In my more generous moments I would’ve called what she did grounding, said that she kept us all from getting too far up our own asses. But it was hard to feel generous all of the time.

Our mother was long dead to a mundane form of cancer--it seemed to irritate her at the time, in between the genuine grief, that she wasn’t going to be dramatically murdered in a pool of gin and blood like the Hollywood starlet she wasn’t--and our father recently dead to the effects of long term alcoholism and we three were alive. I thought, in a fit of sentimentality, that it would be nice to come together and be alive, sitting on the sand in a tourist town in the off season and let ourselves be salt brined by the ocean air and feel alive.

I didn’t expect us to share feelings. God knows nothing in our lives had prepared us for that. But I thought that the simple fact of being present together would ease something in us. Could maybe help hold us together.

On April third I got a phone call from Hela’s landlord. She had killed herself the night before, just one week to the day to when I would be seeing her at the beach house, and would I come and clean out her rented room so he could get it cleaned to rent to someone new?

I made use of Tony’s ridiculous built-in wet bar that night, drank until my face was numb and then laid face down out on the patio like that melodrama might solve anything. I fell asleep there, startling awake at one in the morning covered in a blanket Tony had likely put there. My sister was still dead. I still had to go.


	2. Chapter 2

For all that he’d complained about rearranging his schedule to make room for our trip, Loki managed to get time off from his classes within half an hour of my calling him the next morning, assuring me that he’d head to Pritch Harbor on the first plane and meet me at the hotel.

I was never clear on how Hela had ended up there. It was an ugly little place, only 200 people living there in total, and there was almost no industry. And no grocery stores. I was told secondhand that she bought her food at the gas station a two mile walk from her apartment, and then brought them back in a cart she’d borrowed from a neighbor. A lot of updates about my sister came that way when my father was still alive. She had a tendency to talk at you, barrelling through the information she had to deliver and never quite giving you space to ask questions. If she didn’t want you to know details, you wouldn’t, and for whatever reason both Loki and I were never on her list of people to update. So we heard about her life in bits and pieces, through dad who she saw fit to share them with. Hela’s lost her job again. Hela’s got a new art show lined up. Hela’s left the hospital against medical advice. Hela’s adopted two dogs. Hela’s gone on disability. Hela’s nurse helped her find an apartment. Hela’s dogs are dead.

I didn’t hate her, I don’t think any of us hated her, but she lived her life with a keen paranoia that we all did, and in response she created a distance between her and anyone who might be “negative”. I’m not sure what negative ever meant. Maybe I _was_ negative.

I sat on a tall chair at the breakfast bar in my big kitchen, tallying up the bedrooms in my house. Tony’s house. The house. Wondering if maybe I should have offered on to her at some point in time, if it would’ve done anything. If she would’ve even accepted.

Tony shoved a bowl of muck at me--colorful fruit pieces and a pile of dumped out smoothie and a swirl of meusli on top like he planned to have it photographed for a magazine--and swatted me on the forehead.

“Stop thinking.”

I stuck my tongue out at him.

“I think I’m allowed.”

“I’ll tell you what you’re allowed. You’re allowed to be miserable and you’re allowed to hate everything about what’s happening, but you’re not allowed to start hating yourself.”

I frowned. “I don’t hate myself.”

“You were going to. Once your brain had settled on some meaningless bullshit you could’ve done that would’ve kept her alive.”

He was right, as he usually is. For all that Loki teased me for gold digging and Hela spat profanities about masculine manchildren, what Tony brought to my life was a prism through which to see the rest of my life clearer. He’d been through hell, and while he’d never hit the full lows that he would’ve if his parents couldn’t afford to pay for rehab each time, he had still experienced the full spectrum of human despair. He knew all the ugly things inside of himself, had them catalogued in a neat card system, and could hold them up to other people and situations until something fit.

When I’d just met him, years earlier, and we were still in the “not dating just fucking” mild homophobia part of our relationship, he had come over to my house one evening. I’d spent the afternoon that day scraping dad off the floor and pouring him into bed, making sure he was propped in the recovery position so he wouldn’t choke to death on vomit in his stupor, and cleaning beer out of the carpet. He’d watched me with glassy eyes as I worked, seemingly content to lay in his cocoon of blankets, until I’d finished and then he’d said, casual as anything, “I’m like this because you let me be. I’d be better by now, if it wasn’t for you.”

It didn’t matter that I was thirty, already. It didn’t matter that I knew he was full of shit. It only mattered that my dad had yanked his love away again, like always, like he did periodically when he felt that things were going too well.

Tony had found me pacing in an impotent rage in my apartment, snarling about ungratefulness and injustice, and he’d studied me. Stood there with his hands in his pockets while I spilled out all the mismatched pieces of my life and watched me. When I stopped for breath, and splayed out on the couch like I expected to pass out, he’d shrugged.

“He wants you to feel complicit, because he doesn’t think you’ll stay otherwise. If you think it’s your fault, and you think that whatever you’re currently doing isn’t the way to fix it, then you’ll keep showing up and keep trying to figure out a new tactic and he won’t lose you.”

“Yeah, I know he wants me to feel bad--” I’d groused, but Tony had cut me off.

“Not bad. Complicit.”

Because they are different. They were different. Dad’s cruelty wasn’t rooted in sadism, it was rooted in a genuine belief that this was the only way anyone would ever be on his team. That this was the only reason people stayed together, or said they loved one another, or helped each other. And I couldn’t convince him otherwise, not ever. I could only refuse to play into it.

Tony saw it in a twenty minute rant, and he saw my own wallowing self doubt in my grumpy expression that morning at the breakfast bar, and I was suddenly desperate for him to come along and guide me through what was coming.

“What’s going on for you at work?” I asked, trying to seem like I was changing the subject.

“Mergers and acquisitions is practically on fire, why?”

He raised an eyebrow at me and I sighed, a headache that had been lingering at the back of my head now gaining strength.

“Nothing.” I stirred the contents of my bowl until all the pretty pieces were together in a gravelly mess. “I don’t know how long cleaning it all out will take. I probably won’t see you for a few days, maybe a week.”

“No, I imagine not,” he said, “but you’ll see me at the beach house. That’s just a short drive from her place isn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

I knew so. I’d chosen it for that reason, because I knew she’d never have the money for a flight anywhere and she’d never accept mine.

Tony reached out and grabbed at the side of my neck, his palm warm and rough and bracing.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can be. And this part of your life won’t last forever. Time moves at one second per second no matter what we do.”


	3. Chapter 3

When I was young, I was convinced I would end up a football star. I never played on the school teams, overburdened as they were by actual rules and regulations, but I loved playing with neighborhood kids and excelled in scrimmages.

Our version of the game was a bit different. It involved water balloons, for one thing, and we played adjacent to a creek so that at any moment the opposing team could band together and shove you into the water. It was violent, senselessly so, and involved a fair amount of improvisation, and based on the way both of my parents would scream at the television during football games I assumed it was more or less how the NFL would play.

My father would criticize every choice made, fancying himself a sports reporter and talking as if us kids were supposed to be taking notes, while my mother would just scream. Short things, at the top of her lungs, like “Kill him!” and “Knock him out!”

Tony tends to use big words when he’s picking people and situations apart, words he learned from therapists and psychiatrists and which are, no doubt, accurate. I prefer to phrase it just like this: based on the sort of people my parents admired, and the sort of people they were to each other, I thought that my best shot at making them proud of me would be going on television and kicking in the teeth of some hapless quarterback.

I still don’t think I was wrong, but football doesn’t actually work that way, so I had to try other things.

Loki arrived to the hotel before me, and had overtaken a corner booth in the bar just off the lobby by the time I got there, his work spread out before him and something bright red sitting in a martini glass in front of him.

“Little early, yeah?” I asked, pointing at the glass.

“It’s virgin,” he said absentmindedly, “but I need the sugar and they don’t have any good cola here.”

I snorted.

“You’re like a fucking hummingbird, I swear.”

He looked up at that, finally, and flipped closed the folder in his hands. He looked fond, a small smile ready for me like it always was, even when we’d been fighting. Which wasn’t infrequent for us. We were different people, or that’s how he put it, but we were still brothers. Still family.

His thoughts must have taken a similar path because our faces soured at the same time at the reminder of what we were here to attend to: family.

“I got ahold of that feckless fucking landlord this morning,” Loki said, “and he’s meeting us at the apartment at noon.”

I nodded and took a seat beside him.

“Three hours then.”

He nodded back.

“What are you working on here?” I asked. I never really understood his work, other than that it was related to medieval literature and illuminated manuscripts--those gilded bible pages where ancient priests drew dicks in the margins. I never told him, in so many words, but it always felt like work suited to him. I imagine he’d hit me if I ever did say it.

“The phantom time hypothesis. Some morons who’ve never heard of Asia have theorized that Europe’s intellectual dark age and lack of record-keeping can’t possibly have been real, and 300 years of silence were just added to the calendar for political reasons. I have it tied into white supremacy groups and their particular flavor of historical revisionism, but I’m not quite sure yet if it will resolve itself into an actual chapter or just become a profanity laden blog post.”

I hummed, and caught the eye of the middle aged waiter unlucky enough to be working the morning shift.

“Much difference between those?”

Loki snorted. “The Chicago Manual of Style.”

I didn’t quite understand his joke and although I could have asked I didn’t think it would ever matter in my life to know. I was, after all, the never-quite-football-star of the family. The brash machismo laden blue collar worker who made his living with a pickup truck full of dirt and rocks. It was what these conversations always came back around to, on the occasions that I did ask. My lack of awareness of historical figures, my brother’s lack of awareness of anything physical and frivolous. I didn’t resent him for the assumptions he made about me, not when half of them were true anyway. Were it not for the gay thing, I imagine I would’ve been my parents’ perfect son, and Loki with his professional acclaim and rebellion through success would have been the perfect black sheep. Standing out, but still belonging.

I’m not sure what that would’ve made Hela.

But, whatever would have been, our parents with all of their well-intentioned white liberal prejudice had managed to turn out three gay children, and they’d done an admirable job of pretending they were okay with it.

Though they’d still pushed each of us towards the opposite sex and the subject of biological children periodically, like it might one day convince one of us to change their mind. My sister, as the eldest and therefore the pioneering gay, was sent to a therapist to talk about her issues with sex and why she felt the need to make this decision so early in her life. She was sixteen at the time and, according to her, a virgin. I believed her, even though my parents didn’t. What were any of us doing at sixteen years old besides blushing and pretending we knew what a vagina felt like?

After a few visits spent trying genuinely to explain how fundamental her feelings for women were, she eventually grew frustrated and started to answer every question with the word “cunnilingus”. My parents didn’t try the therapy trick again with Loki or I.

That was Hela, I suppose. What she was to us and what she was to herself. When she would help us, it would be sideways, as a side effect of whatever she was trying to do for herself. She had always been changing and unstable. She could be productive and cooperative, eager to please and show affection one day, and then angry and sharp, bitter and poisonous the next. She would break plates during arguments, reveling in the noise they made against the floor and the wide eyed surprise it always elicited in us, and then collect the pieces for a mural the next day and present it as a gift.

Of course that was just a fancy way of saying she had always had a mood disorder. I knew that now, through Tony, through his experiences and big words and psychiatrists. I found it strange looking back that a therapist had never been called over Hela’s moods the way it had over the lesbianism, and then I decided it wasn't strange at all knowing our folks.

“You want to go to the beach house, after this?” I asked, breaking the silence that had fallen between us. Loki looked up at me and his eyebrows scrunched up on his face. “I just thought...I don’t know how many days at this hotel you paid for, but I rented the whole month at the house so it should be empty and...it just might be nice. Nicer. To be there.”

He pursed his lips along with the rest of his face and his head tilted side to side, like it did when he was thinking. The hotel was an hour west of Pritch Harbor, just close enough to civilization to be near an airport, and the beach house was an hour and a half south. It wasn’t a more advantageous area for what we had to do, and I knew no one but me had really given two shits about the now spoiled vacation. But I had reserved it, set it aside with a room intended for her, and whatever belongings we were going to retrieve from her room that day would be better stored there. I couldn’t stand the idea of sorting through her photos and receipts on top of an impersonal hotel comforter, the smell of antiseptic faintly in my nose from the maid’s visit.

Whatever his reasons, however they matched up with or diverged from mine, Loki nodded.

“Yeah, alright. I’ll check back out just before we head to see the landlord.”

I let out a breath and smiled when the waiter finally ambled his way to our table. I hadn’t even checked in yet. I’d never see the comforters there.


	4. Chapter 4

The landlord was an ugly little thing, although it seemed like an ugliness born of circumstance and not any unfortunate genetics. His teeth were yellowed and full of seeds from whatever he’d eaten before arriving. His hair was cut sloppily, and clung to his temples with either sweat or grease. And the cheap material of his shirt showed through to the tank top underneath. He greeted us with a grimace that seemed like he meant it to be a smile.

“Hey there, I’m Tom.”

I offered a hand for him to shake. His own palm was coated in some kind of grit.

“I’m Thor, this is Loki,” I jerked my head toward my brother where he stood behind me, “Which one was Hela’s?”

The landlord dug around in his pockets, fishing like maybe the key wouldn’t be there after all, before finally producing it. He wandered away from us, towards the end of the building by the alley.

It wasn’t a true apartment. There was no lobby with rows of brass mailboxes, or elevator where two neighbors might wait silently together. There wasn’t a row of stoops like you would see with brownstones, each boasting its own set of potted plants that reflected the residents. There was just a building, a door every few feet on the first floor, and a staircase along the side that wrapped around to a set of doors presumably on the back of the second floor. Most had their curtains tightly shut, if they had a window at all, and only half had numbers pasted to the outside of the door.

Hela’s door had the number written in permanent marker. The landlord jammed the key in and then pressed his weight against the door to force it open. I got a vision of Hela doing the same each and every night as she came home, a gas station bag filled with cans of chili and American Spirit cigarettes dangling from one arm. A sharp pain started behind my breastbone and grew outward.

Inside, the lights were dim and Loki stepped around me to make for the windows, throwing open curtains and tugging up blinds in the hopes of inviting some natural light. My eyes swept the room, anxious and afraid. I knew her body wouldn’t be here, that much had been said on the phone. Still, a part of me was expecting to see it.

Instead, I saw a low bedframe and a bare mattress on top. The sheets were folded on top of a small nightstand like she intended to put them on, later, and the comforter lay at the foot of the bed in a heap. There was a small cabinet set into the wall just by the door with a sink and a microwave. Beyond that, a minifridge was tucked under a card table, which was bookended by two folding chairs.

Strewn across the floor was a mess of paper: receipts and bills and wrappers and bus tickets. Anything you could think to throw away or organize into a filing cabinet was instead dropped carelessly, and then trampled, over and over until I was sure if I peeled some of it up I would be able to trace back months of her life in the compacted layers.

Against the far wall, where Loki now stood, there was a radiator, and a trash can full of clothes.

A collage of flowers, both real and cut from magazines, was pinned to the wall with bright orange thumbtacks.

Dirty dishes were perched on every surface.

On the table, half of a broken plate was smeared with something she had been eating off of it.

It stank, in that small room.

“I’ll give you guys the day to gather what’s important, and then I’ve got a junk guy coming. Gonna have to have this place bleached top to bottom to make it usable again.”

The landlord hustled away before either of us could respond, leaving the door open behind him. I watched him disappear and then studied the view through the front door for a moment after. From where I was standing, just two steps inside, I could see a chinese restaurant with the neon lights unlit, and a presumably closed video store with empty shelves still inside.

Loki’s voice was thin when he spoke.

“Where do you...where should we start?”

“We should try and sift through this stuff. Try and find any documents she might have had. I don’t think the furniture is really worth saving.”

Loki nodded and went to sit on the edge of the mattress. His long hair fell in front of his face when he bent forward to grab a handful of trash from the floor, and I was struck with how out of place he seemed, even dressed as casually as he was in a dark colored polo shirt and dark blue chinos. I can’t say how I looked. Jeans and a t-shirt might fit in better, but it was hard to imagine anyone seeming at home in this space.

I ignored my own directions and walked instead to the cabinets, throwing them wide so the door smacked into the drywall beside it. The handle on the cabinet door left a small, rounded dent in the paint, and at a glance I saw many more small dents, dapping that section of wall with all the times she’d flung them open just the same.

Inside sat a small plastic tub of coffee grounds, ten different tea boxes, filters, packets of aspartame, and a tea strainer shaped like an octopus. Directly below on the counter a coffeemaker was tucked behind the microwave like it was meant to be a secret, but I suspect she just didn’t have the space.

The next cabinet over had a few rice cakes, lots of spices, and a handful of plain white mugs. The ones on the bottom mainly held soap and some protein bars. The fridge had coffee creamer and a single box of fudge pops. I could feel my brow drawing down.

“I don’t think she was eating.”

A rattle sounded behind me and I glanced over my shoulder to trace it. Loki had fished a pill bottle out of the detritus on the floor, not prescription but over the counter and a violent red and silver. I recognized it from midnight commercials, meant only for the insomniac and night shift workers. Diet pills. I couldn’t say if they worked, if they were anything more than sugar placebos, but I remembered the illustrations of an obese man and a skinny man wearing the same shorts.

“I think you’re right about that,” Loki said.

He tossed it back onto the floor. I closed the fridge and shuffled around to sit on the floor. There was so much of this stuff that I didn’t want to touch. Wrappers from the popsicles still slick with melted chocolate, sticking to tabloid magazines and soaking the pages. The paper from between cheese slices, rolled deliberately into tight, greasy balls. An envelope from a company I didn’t recognize but which sounded vaguely medical, covered with angry red “delinquent” stamps. From somewhere in the pile, a corner of slippery looking photo paper stuck up, like a shipwrecked victim trying not to drown, and I reached out delicately to pull it out with the tips of my fingers.

It was from a Christmas when we were children, from when we still printed out our photos instead of allowing them to stay in digital form on Facebook forever. The three of us sat on the ground in our old house, wearing matching pajamas we’d received the night before. Mom was curled up with us, lounging to one side as if to display us. Look at the children I have borne and envy me, the domestic goddess. Dad sat behind us, hair already gray and looking not unlike Santa Clause, with a tumblr of whiskey in one hand.

Hela had poked out all the eyes in the photo with something sharp.

“What a drama queen,” I said. My throat was tight enough that I hardly got the words out.


End file.
